"Never felt less inclined to be funny in my life. 'Pon my word, I assure you!" asseverates Bingo. "You're simply a bundle of irritable nerves, my dear chap, and that's the truth."
"You wouldn't wonder if you knew ... Oh, damn it, Wrynche!"—the young voice breaks in a miserable sob—"I'm so thundering miserable. And all because there—there was a kid coming, and I did the straight thing by its mother."
"Whew!" Captain Bingham Wrynche gives vent to a long, piercing, dismal whistle, which so upsets a gaunt mongrel prowling vainly for garbage in the gutters of Market Square that he puts up his nose and howls in answer. "Was that how you fell into the——" He is obviously going to say "trap," but with exceeding clumsiness substitutes "state." And wonders at the thing having been pulled off so quietly in these days, when confounded newspapers won't let you call your soul your own.
"That's because I signed my name 'John Basil Edward Tobart,'" explains Beauvayse; "and because the Registrar—a benevolent old cock in a large white waistcoat, like somebody's father in a farcical comedy—wasn't sufficiently up in the Peerage to be impressed."
"Weren't there witnesses of sorts?" hints Bingo.
"Of sorts. The housekeeper at the cottage and my man Saunders—the discreet Saunders who's with me here. And a fortnight later came the appointment," goes on the boy. "And—I was gladder than I cared to know at getting away. She—Lessie—meant to play her part in the 'Chiffon Girl' up to the end of the Summer Season, and then rest until ..." He does not finish the sentence.
"I suppose she's fond of you—what?" hazards Captain Bingo.
"She cares a good deal, poor girl, and was frightfully cut up at my going, and I provided for her thoroughly well, of course, though she has heaps of money of her own. And when I went to stay with my people for a night before sailing, I'd have broken the—the truth to my mother then, only something in her face corked me tight. From the moment I took the plunge, the consciousness of what a rotten ass I'd been had been growin' like a snowball. But on the voyage out"—a change comes into the weary, level voice in which Beauvayse has told his story—"I forgot to grouse, and by the time we'd lifted the Southern Cross I wasn't so much regretting what I'd done as wondering whether I should ever shoot myself because I'd done it? Up in Rhodesia I forgot. The wonderful champagne air, and the rousing hard work, the keen excitement and the tingling expectation of things that were going to happen by-and-by, that have been happening about as since October, were like pleasant drugs that keep you from thinking. I only remembered now and then, when I saw Lessie's photograph hanging on the wall of my quarters, and the portrait she had set in the back of my sovereign-case, that she and me were husband and wife." He gives a mirthless laugh. "It makes so little impression on a fellow's mind somehow, to mooch into a Registrar's office with a woman and answer a question or two put by a fat, middle-aged duffer who's smiling himself into creases, and give your name and say, 'No, there's no impediment,' and put on the ring and pay a fee—I believe it was seven-and-six—and take a blotchy certificate and walk out—married."
"It never does take long, by Gad!" agrees Captain Bingo with fervour, "to do any of the things that can't be undone again."
"Undone ...!" Beauvayse sits up suddenly and turns his miserable, beautiful, defiant eyes full on the large, perturbed face of his listener. "Wrynche, Wrynche! I've felt I'd gladly give my soul to be able to undo it, ever since I first set eyes on Lynette Mildare!"